4/29/2008
Wisconsin is not the exception
This New York Times piece by David Brooks is a good read, detailing the “ensuing segmentation” of the “mass educated class” that has reshaped politics.
This year’s election has revealed a deep cultural gap within the Democratic Party, separating what Stuart Rothenberg calls the two Democratic parties.
In state after state (Wisconsin being the outlier), Barack Obama has won densely populated, well-educated areas. Hillary Clinton has won less-populated, less-educated areas. For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties. In state after state, Obama has won a few urban and inner-ring suburban counties. Clinton has won nearly everywhere else. [My empahsis added.]
Go on to read the whole thing. It’s interesting stuff. But note too, the brief qualifier. Brooks claimed Wisconsin was the exception to his education-segmentation theory.
I don’t get this. Why the media can’t briefly explain Wisconsin’s weird primary system to the rest of the world. The Washington Post, earlier in the primary season, claimed phenomenal change was coming.
Some examples: In Wisconsin's 8th District, where Democrat Steve Kagen won a tight race in 2006 in what had been a GOP district, 127,000 Democrats turned out for the Feb. 19 primary, compared with 56,000 Republicans.
But as I said in an earlier post,
Needless to say (at least for Wisconsin voters - who've been voting in open primaries since time immemorial - well, 1904) the numbers are bogus in trying to prove Democratic superiority. (In an interesting brief piece about an aberration in our open primary, Tom Still calls it "one of the few presidential contests in which voters are actually encouraged to color outside the partisan lines.") In holding the most open primary in the country, where a voter simply chose which column on the ballot to vote in, tens of thousands of 8th District Republicans 'crossed over' with zero effort to create a little froth amidst candidates Obama and Hillary.
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